The key quality-of-life improvements, in no particular order, are:
– You can now choose to start with the first planet already under your control, and thus skip that first battle that tended to be the same.
– Turrets and similar structures that you build now leave remains that you can rebuild, similar to AIWC. Not having to manually re-place turrets after every significant defense is very nice.
– Tech costs and various other numbers are now rounded to not be weird values like 1199 (instead 1200, in that case).
– BadgerBadger’s “Find Planet” function has been integrated. Thanks Badger!
– BadgetBadger’s improved campaign-based save/load system has been integrated. Thanks Badger! (I keep finding myself saying that) The structure of the campaign data is likely to change to something more robust before 1.0, but this is a definite step in the right direction.

Up next is more of the same troubleshooting: finding the trouble that gets in the way of the game being fun, and shooting it. For now I’m focusing on my own testing as it’s a tighter feedback loop in many ways, but that will be broadening out.